Most currently installed video surveillance systems are based on NTSC/PAL/SECAM analog video cameras with camera resolution rigidly fixed by the corresponding video standard. Thus, to inspect fine detail of the scene, NTSC surveillance systems have to rely on expensive optical zoom. However, higher optical zoom inevitably corresponds to reduced field of view of the camera, requiring the operator to make a choice between higher level of detail and higher coverage of the area under surveillance.
On the other hand, leveraging high-speed LAN infrastructures and employing high resolution (multi-megapixel) network cameras in video surveillance allows to avoid many of the shortcomings associated with low resolution NTSC cameras. Network video cameras rely on packet-oriented digital image transmission are not limited to any particular image resolution and frame rate. This opens the door for the development of high-resolution video surveillance systems that are overall superior to existing NTSC systems and provide video-rate multi-format functionality previously unavailable in video surveillance.